The Slow-Motion Escape

Another lull. In between the deadlines and the crises, it has all suddenly gone quiet, although it's only temporary, I know. Just enough time to reflect a little more on the last couple of months and try to describe something of the slow-motion escape.

The initial problem was the question before us. 'Should we apply for this job in the UK?' is not the same as, 'should we move back home?', because there was the very real possibility that someone else would be hired instead. We had to commit to the notion of returning to Britain, but without immediately disengaging from our lives in the US, and, whilst both outcomes remained possible, I tried not to think about any of it at all. Tried and failed, of course, because once we had decided to apply, we had made up our minds, even if we weren't prepared to say it out loud. As soon as Laura hit send on that application, we were heading for the exit, whether she got the job or not.

I mentioned before the relief that came with the realisation that we were really going home. It's a complex mixture of feelings and responses, but there was one powerful element of it which surprised us, I think. We had to talk it through a few times, but we pieced it together. Going home meant an escape. Not from America itself precisely - it's not as if we haven't enjoyed our time here. But once we knew we were leaving, our perspective changed, and anxieties we had suppressed or ignored became things we could get away from. It became clear that we had both felt an unwelcome sense of exposure, but could only now acknowledge it. If our luck held for just a few more months, we could leave unscathed.

What were we worried about? Big things. High risk, low probability events. The sort of things that would only happen, or would be horribly exacerbated because we were living in America. The sort of thing that we had never been brought up to worry about.

Guns. That's the big one. America's insane relationship with firearms that turns schools into crime scenes and police officers into soldiers. Although statistically unlikely, whilst we are here it is possible that one of us could be shot, or have a gun pointed at us, either by a criminal, by the police, by an unsupervised child, or just by a bystander who thought they were being a 'good guy'. This madness doesn't exist in Britain. Going home means never having to worry about assault rifles, or that beeping my horn on the freeway is going tempt a fellow road user to pull a shotgun on me. It means that the next time one of my kids has a nightmare about a gunman in their school, I can promise them it will never, ever happen. When I think about this I realise I am counting the minutes to our departure.

So many things haven't happened to us. We've got through six hurricane seasons without a scratch. In 2008, Ike, a storm hundreds of miles across, went straight over the top of us and we didn't even suffer a broken window. None of us has been diagnosed with a major disease; the kids haven't broken a single bone. Either of those eventualities would have cost us hundreds or thousands of dollars thanks to a healthcare system designed to milk the American people of their money in order to swell the profits of massive corporations. We haven't been smashed into by a driver who was drunk, or high, or texting. None of Laura's hundreds of flights has crashed. We haven't had to miss any funerals back home. We haven't stumbled on a snake, or an alligator, or a bear. Okay, yes, we did stumble on alligators, and a bear, but we all retain all our original limbs and internal organs.

There were other things too. More insidious things, like racism and the attacks on women's rights. This growing social conservatism was only going to make America, and especially Texas, a less friendly place in which to live. In Britain our politics are moderately left of centre; here we're diabolical radicals.

Enough of that. Time to go.

And so the slow countdown started. We are going, we are leaving - but not quite yet. As the weeks pass, it increasingly feels like that long moment in a heist or POW movie where the escapee is trying to walk out under the noses of the guards, keeping his gait casual, trying not to sweat, not to run, hoping his papers will pass inspection, all the time waiting for a bullet in the back.

If this all sounds over anxious, paranoid even, it's because we are so close, and the proximity of our departure exaggerates everything out of proportion. The days creep past, even though this should be a frantic period, as we clear hurdles and cross of things to do. We have our tickets. We've had our papers checked, satisfied the IRS of our good standing and received their permission to leave the country. The removal men have come and gone and the house is empty. The cars have been sold.

Just three weeks to go: a few more forms to be completed, the final school concerts, the last farewell parties. One more Christmas.

And then the drive to the airport. I'll check in the bags and the cat, and endure one more TSA line. We'll board the plane, find our seats. Wait for the sudden thrum of the engines that pushes us up into the sky and away.

That's when Laura and I will share a look, and what I'll be thinking is:

"It's been a gamble and an adventure, a wonderful collection of experiences and encounters. I'm glad we did it, I'm glad we did it together, but most of all I'm glad we got away with it."

A Warning from History

Image: Hope Not Hate

Today in Sweden, the centre-left Prime Minister Stefan Lofven was forced to call elections after the far-right Sweden Democrat party killed a crucial budget vote. The Sweden Democrats (such an innocuous name) are against immigration, Swedish membership of the EU, and are critical of rights that have been given to the indigenous Sami people. In the United States of America yesterday, Republican politicians discussed their plans to try and thwart President Obama's executive order, which offers millions of illegal immigrants protection from deportation. Last week Binyamin Netanyahu proposed that citizenship in Israel should be restricted to Jews. In the UK, we've seen a race to the bottom over recent months as David Cameron and Ed Miliband have struggled to match the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party. Just a few months ago Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, claiming that it was only looking after ethnic Russians. All this only a few years after a massive financial catastrophe.

As a kid I was frogmarched through 20th century history. I like to think we all were. We studied the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (another innocuous name!), of Mussolini, of Mosley and his desire for British isolationism. We explored in detail the causal relationships between economic crises and political extremism and intolerance. We saw how people turned inwards and blamed others for their troubles, how populism and electoral compromises combined to destroy democracy. We saw how some nations responded by increasing their military spending and flexing their muscles in an attempt to restore lost pride or secure resources. We read about it all, we watched the documentaries and the interviews.

"Thank God," we said to ourselves, "that we are learning this lesson. We are listening to the voices of the dead: the victims, whose corpses we watched being bulldozed into pits; the soldiers forced to kill each other; the children burnt to ashes. We must hear their testimony, because it will tell us how to prevent this from happening again. We will know the signs. The missteps and the mistakes that lead to disaster. We will ignore the men who tell us our problems are the fault of others, that we should turn on those who have less than us. We will ignore the men who win our trust by making us more afraid. In hindsight, it is all so clear. How sad it is that the people of those times fell for their lies so easily. We will not make the same mistakes. Thank God."

The Question Answered

This is the thing that has been approaching. We are moving. Leaving America and returning to the UK. It is happening now, albeit at a glacial pace. The removal people are here, packing and wrapping, and heroically trying to decipher all the explanatory post-its we have left up about the house.

We aren't, ourselves, flying home today. That's not happening until after Christmas. So the whole process is strangely drawn out; longeurs of planning or tidying interrupted by bursts of activity, like today, when Things Suddenly Change.

We've greatly enjoyed our time here in America, and I'll come back to that at some point in the future, but right now I feel mostly just relieved. Ever since we arrived in Houston, since before we even decided we were coming here, the question has been hovering: how long were we going to stay? All the time we've been here, that's been second, sometimes the third thing anyone has asked us. "Where are y'all from? Do you like it here? How long are y'all staying?"

We didn't have an answer, which is fine as long as we weren't asked. In between times, the question sank to the bottom of our minds, obscured by the muddy waters of day-to-day life. There's no reason to agonise about where you're going to be living in ten years time when you've got to decide what's for dinner tonight.

And the main thing was that we were happy. Laura was happy with her job, we were all happy with the schools. Houston was an easy place to live. We were fine. If we stayed, we would carry on being fine. If an opportunity to move back turned up, we would probably take it, but there was no way to engineer such an opening and so in the meantime we could just carry on. The day-to-day stuff kept happening.

But every time someone asked the question, it reminded me that we didn't, couldn't know what was going to happen to us. And it began to feel like there two very different futures waiting for us simultaneously: one American, one British. Neither unpleasant, but would we get to choose, or would the decision be made for us? The longer we stayed, the more likely it was that the day-to-day stuff would harden about us like concrete: as soon as one of the boys was in a serious relationship, or got a job, it would be almost impossible to consider moving back home.

And then, rather suddenly, an opening did come up. In August we were adapting to middle school, planning Christmas, and mulling over if we should move neighbourhoods. In September we were faced with choosing between two continents. That we got to choose between those two futures, that we got to weigh up the advantages of each, that was a big relief. It felt good to go through the process and to evaluate our options. It went back and forth, but it was soon clear that we should go home, that the UK was home, even if the boys had spent more than half their lives across the water. It's not that the US is a horrible place: for all its faults, it has been exciting and fun to live here. But it has always felt like a foreign country, and I have always felt like a visitor.

Going home means that this has been a wonderful adventure, and these six years become an extraordinary episode in our lives. If we were to stay, no matter how much fun we might have, at some point America would become boringly normal.

He/She/It Was Approaching

Okay, so why appropinquabat? That's a perfectly reasonable question. There are [glances at the as yet unwritten final paragraph] three reasons.

Firstly, and most importantly, it was available - not a quality that can be overlooked when trying to settle on a name for a blog or website.

Secondly, the wishy-washy bit. The present is a confusing time in which to live. The world changes constantly and every day offers new situations or developments: new data demands us to assess what we thought we knew; things we take for granted distort or crumble; opportunities arise that must be weighed. Invariably we have to act straight away, long before we are able to discern the consequences.

I don't like this. My instinct is to prevaricate, so I don't close off potential options by making a decision. It's a pretty useless way to live, especially for any loved ones or colleagues who need to plan ahead, but sometimes, every now and again, waiting and doing nothing can turn out to have been the right answer.

And in between dodging decisions about the future and being muddled by the present, I am looking at the past - sometimes just because I am still trying to understand it, but more often just because it is fun. Looking back, we get to see more than we could at the time, or at least we get to see the same amount from a different vantage point.

Then I rediscovered this wonderful word: appropinquabat: "he, she, or it was approaching"); it delighted me. I love how the tenses are blended. It suggests the ephemeral passing moment, and the past event, reflected upon later, and even the as yet unseen future, pregnant with opportunity, or foreboding. This is how we interact with the universe: we try to anticipate the future, events occur, and then we understand them. To have all of this forwards-backwardsness wrapped up into one word is extremely pleasing.

The third reason: was there ever a word that was more fun to say out loud?

Deep Breath

Obviously, I have had nothing else going on in my life for last nine months, but now, from my slumber, my hibernation, I awake at last, and with a Deep Breath.

I'm not sure I should be writing about new Doctor Who. When I began I was revisiting old episodes, watching them again with hindsight, and that's really easy to do: the original viewing sets a benchmark, everything that has happened since provides context, and all one needs to do to have an opinion is short the differential between the two.

But now I've caught up, and that makes it harder. We don't know where this is going and all I can do is make snap judgments - and I am sure to disagree with myself in the future.

The upshot of this hand-wringing is that I am (of course) going to write about this episode now but with the proviso that these aren't my final, considered thoughts. That comes later, after the end of the season, after the end of this Doctor, or the next.

But, for now, I was thrown, initially, by the slower pace. This is part of the much-vaunted change in style we were promised by this year's fearsome publicity machine but, despite the warnings, I found myself missing the helter-skelter zinginess of the last few years. A second viewing helped enormously, and it became clear how key moments benefitted from a slower treatment. Vastra's admonishment of Clara; the Doctor's haranguing of a tramp; the restaurant reunion; Clara's eye-bulging, lung-bursting escape attempt. These scenes all enjoyed space and time that has not been available recently. But for all that, the running time is still a gargantuan seventy-six minutes and some moments beg to be cut, most obviously Clara's medical - included to honour a Blue Peter competition. A few trims elsewhere (why all the writing on the floor with the chalk?) and this episode could at least have cantered along between the slower, more significant scenes.

Wisely, given that there is so much to be done with the Doctor and Clara, Moffat serves up a simple and familiar plot. The return of the clockwork robots from the 51st century is very welcome, especially when they provide such striking visuals and visceral scares as they do here. Half-Face Man looks amazing, partly down to the astonishing effects work, and partly due to a lovely performance by Peter Ferdinando: a combination of jarring robotic movements and snarling desperation that gives way, before the end, to a touching humanity. With their penchant for body parts and an implacable indefatigability, these robots are formidable and truly scary. Inadvertently they show us what a Cyberman story is supposed to look like - especially in the wonderful moment when Clara uses logic to resist Half-Face Man's threats and make him reveal his plans.

Coleman is great throughout, and a chief beneficiary of this slower pacing that allows Clara to show more of her character than has so far been possible since The Bells of Saint John. She is rightly shocked and unnerved by the regeneration, indignant, learned and eloquent at Vastra, resourceful and brave when she tries to escape the robots, and so, so clever during her interrogation. At the end, and most importantly, she demonstrates her compassion for this strange man who has replaced her friend.

And what about this new Doctor? Well, if nothing else Capaldi and Moffat are clearly a good fit for each other ("Don't look in the mirror? It's furious!"), but there is more to his performance than just getting all the best lines. On the muddy shore of the Thames, Capaldi, distractedly rattling out his thoughts, gives us a few final hand-flapping moments of the Eleventh Doctor. In the bedroom, this has become confusion and genuine desperation, and it is this vulnerability, which comes to the fore once again at the end of the episode, that it is more interesting and surprising than the darker steeliness which we knew to expect. It's not the fury or the shell-shock that Eccleston's Doctor kept hidden away, neither is it the loneliness of Tennant, or the sudden weeping of Smith. This Doctor is keenly aware of and embarrassed by how pathetic he looks to Clara, but he absolutely needs her. He is at her mercy, waiting for her to see the man she knows inside the stranger before her.

Really, of course, he is speaking to us, asking us not to reject him. This makes it all the more surprising that Moffat brings in Matt Smith at that very moment to make the point on Capaldi's behalf. It's a very brave decision. By then, having survived the adventure and watched the Twelfth Doctor gradually assert himself, I was ready to accept him - the sudden reappearance of the old Doctor only served to make me realise how much I missed him. But, as much as it forces the audience to compare Smith and Capaldi, it does also absolutely sell the idea that they are indeed the same man, either side of a great change and, of course, it's a typical, ballsy, pull-the-rug-from-under-you moment from Steven Moffat.

The Eleventh Doctor was a wonderful fixer - he refused to accept any defeat, any reverse. He rebooted the Universe and restored Amy's family, he repeatedly saved her marriage with Rory, he reached back into his own past to save River Song, and even to circumvent the destruction of Gallifrey. Now we see his last act was to fix his own future and, anticipating Clara's disappointment, save her and himself from this rejection. Neither we nor Clara can resist him.

More than anything else though, this episode is full of hints and glimpses of what this Doctor has ahead of him. Watching him rebuild himself is fun, but I want to see this new persona in action and to learn the answers to the questions raised here: why did he choose this face? Did Half-Face Man jump, or was he pushed? And who is the, er, eccentric character played by Michelle Gomez in full Sue White mode?

Luckily we have eleven weeks in which to answer these questions, to get used to Capaldi's Doctor and for this new era to bed down and become the new normal. And after all that, we can look back at Deep Breath and, perhaps, see it properly for the first time.

The Time of the Doctor

As much as I enjoyed this episode, it misses a major trick by underselling its key dramatic moment far too cheaply. The result is a good but slightly puzzling story, when perhaps we could have had a transcendent, wonderful one.

I'm not moaning about the beneficence of the Time Lords, or the eventual regeneration - no, the critical moment turns up about half-way through and it passes without any fanfare, despite the fact that it is possibly the most extraordinary thing to happen in Doctor Who since he first regenerated, possibly since he abandoned Susan.

The Doctor stops.

For as long as we have known him, the Doctor has been running. Running from the Time Lords, running around the Universe, running from his responsibilities. When the Time Lords caught him, they punished him by fixing him in place, pinning him to Earth, and it infuriated him. The thought of resuming his presidency made the Fifth Doctor wince. The Tenth Doctor ran from his own demise and then railed and fumed when it finally knocked.

Then here, on Trenzalore, in his last life (more on that later), he finds himself in an unwinnable situation. A stalemate that cannot be broken, only preserved. A peace that can only be enforced if he gives up his travels, his lifestyle, his freedom - and stays still for the rest of this life.

It's a big moment, no? And although I'm not sure I'd want the wailing and gnashing of teeth we saw from Tennant in The End of Time, I do think it could have, and should have, sat a little more heavily on the Eleventh Doctor. As it happens on screen, it's not even clear that he has actively made such a decision. It might be that he just reacts impulsively, and that he only stays because the TARDIS doesn't promptly return from dropping off Clara.

Either way, I think the story suffers from not clearly showing us the Doctor's resolve at that moment: to stay no matter what. We need to see that he knows what he is giving up, even if it is done willingly. Without it, especially on a first viewing, the episode seems to drifts into unfamiliar territory after that point, with voice-overs filling in great swathes of lost time, and the youthful Eleventh Doctor disappearing from the story. Eventually, once Clara comes back, we get a scene where some of this is explained - but it would have been better to have known where we were going, rather than be told where we had arrived.

The same is true of the revelation (during that same conversation) that the Doctor is in his final body. I remember that when The Curse of Fatal Death aired some silly fans complained that this it was part of a BBC conspiracy to finally kill off Doctor Who by using up all his future regenerations in one go. I never had any truck with the more paranoid elements of fandom, but it is head-spinning to have whizzed from a tally of ten regenerations to twelve, and now thirteen, all within six months. There is no sense in which Doctor Who is an exhaustible resource, but I do think that I was rather looking forward to having a Thirteenth Doctor that threatened to be the last. It would have been interesting and new to see him affected by a sense of his own mortality, and it would have leant some extra drama to events building up to his eventual (and inevitable) regeneration.

But here again, we don't get to savour the moment. Thanks to the War Doctor and Tennant², it turns out that we have already had our twelfth regeneration and that the Eleventh Doctor has been mortal all this time. I wish we had known (it would certainly have added weight to The Impossible Astronaut, if nothing else) but instead we have only twenty minutes or so to adjust to the idea before the whole matter is resolved.

I sympathise with the fannish fear that the notion of a 'last' Doctor is a precarious one - dangerous rapids that should be navigated as quickly as possible - but Moffat knows the show has never been more secure than it is now. The hurried culmination of the regeneration cycle has come about more as an accident of scheduling and casting as anything else: the co-incidence of the Fiftieth barrelling straight into a Christmas Special on the one hand, and the unwillingness of Eccleston to return for the anniversary coupled with Smith's decision to leave on the other.

Anyway, once again I have spent a great deal of time describing a small quibble. I have others that can be dealt with more quickly: I don't like using monsters piecemeal like this - it's useful shorthand, but their threat and their significance is reduced as a result. The long-promised answers we got weren't so much loose threads tied up as dead-ends closed off in so much that the answers didn't reveal but merely made the questions redundant. And although the latest explanations of The Crack and the Oldest Question make sense, they do have a whiff of reinvention about them.

But again, these are tiny quibbles and although it could have been even better, this was still a very enjoyable story and full of things to love. The opening ten minutes was completely manic, but chock full of some great jokes; Handles was a lovely addition and a K9 substitute with all of the advantages and none of the problems. Smith doesn't disappoint (has he ever?) and Coleman continues to shine as Clara, a companion who gets better and better as time goes on. Even if she was dangerously peripheral for some of this story, her intervention was crucial (as in The Day of the Doctor) and her reaction to the regeneration, when it came, was fantastic: for the first time in the new series (alright, unless you count Journey's End), the Doctor's demise was witnessed by someone who knew what was happening. Her fear and anxiety were thrillingly discomforting.

And the end itself was lovely: the bow tie discarded, tumbling to the floor; Amy's apparition, benevolent and cathartic... And then, in an instant, he was gone and a new man stood in his place. That was a great trick. It feels right to try and wrongfoot an audience that might think it knows the score. Capaldi doesn't have much opportunity to show his credentials (on first viewing I hankered for him to appear in the bell tower and finish the job that the old Doctor had left behind..), but then that's not the point.

The point is that shimmering blink of an eye when everything changes, when everything is up for grabs and for once, as the TARDIS careers off through the Universe, the question is not where next, but Who?

I can't wait to find out.

The Day of the Doctor

I didn't mean to take a whole month before writing about The Day of the Doctor, but I'm glad I didn't have to think coherently about it straight away. That weekend turned out to be an incredibly intense experience, with The Day of the Doctor, An Adventure in Space and Time, The Five(ish) Doctors and many other shows needing to be watched and then rewatched. It was a lot to take in, and I'm very happy that I wasn't expected to think critically about any of it while I was still watching. Instead I was able to just revel in the absurd and wonderful weekend when Doctor Who (the show that gave us the Myrka, don't forget) delighted a global audience of seventy-five million people.

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. This was an excellent anniversary story that delivered everything that could reasonably have been asked of it, and much more that couldn't even have been imagined. There's so much to talk about, and I'm going to forget some things, but here's what still stands out for me now, a month later.

It begins with a very original opening or, rather, the original opening. Monochrome titles and Delia Derbyshire's unmatchable version of the theme - both still gobsmackingly good and, after a sensible rest from our screens, still retaining the power to shock and delight. Better yet, is there a more suitable way to drive home the point that this is still the same show. Like Trigger's shovel, everything has changed, but this is still Doctor Who.

Much of this episode is whizz-bang fantastic, with great stunts and some extraordinary 3D action over Gallifrey. There are plenty of these kisses to the past throughout the show, but most of them are almost invisible jokes, tucked away in props or muttered comments, to be enjoyed on repeated viewings. But, although the bells and whistles are marvellous, although the Daleks, Zygons, UNIT and Rose all return for their anniversary bow, they're not essential to the unwinding of this story. At last the focus of the programme has come to rest squarely on its lead character, and the result is spellbinding.

The essence of drama since ancient times has been someone talking to themself. Only Doctor Who, of course, can take a soliloquy and turn it into a three-handed conversation. But the point is that this is not a multi-Doctor story in the way we have known it before. In the original series, the character of the Doctor was so much less well defined and, if different versions met, it was their costumes that varied most, and any differences of demeanour resulted as much from the personalities of the actors as anything else. In The Five Doctors, they take turns being the Doctor, even when they're in the same scene. This time we get something else.

That scene in the dungeon of the Tower is centrepiece of a wonderful drama, the lynchpin of the story. Three versions of the same man, locked together, forced to converse and through doing so revealing how they have changed. These aren't personality clashes forced by the arbitrary neural-rewiring of regeneration - at last, the Doctor is portrayed as someone affected by the passage of time, a character moulded by events. Imagine yourself, at 20, at 35, at 50 - trapped in a room. The youngest is eager to find out what happens; the oldest, perhaps, has tried to move on. In between them is a man who regrets his mistakes, who resents the vanished opportunities of youth, and who can't forgive the old man for the fact that he seemingly no longer cares.

That's what we get here, told through three superb performances. Hurt, the young Doctor, watches his older selves with some humour. Smith, impossibly old, trying to remember, but it was all so long ago. Tennant does it with a look. When the Eleventh Doctor mutters that he has no idea how many children were on Gallifrey, the Tenth glances at him - surprised, disgusted, but most of all horrified. What will I become? For most of us, that's a disturbing thought - how much more so for a Time Lord.

Moffat (such a clever trick with the sonic - we thought they were different, but they were always the same) forces even the most casual and incurious member of the Saturday night audience to see these three actors as the same man, not just sharing a title, but the same internal life, the same memories and thoughts. The younger can rekindle hope in the older two; the old dogs can show the whelp that the future is worth fighting for. Youth and experience combine to undo past mistakes, without evading their consequences.

The Doctor is the centre of the episode, of the story, of the whole anniversary, and the restoration of Gallifrey is a fitting present for the old man. It's very slickly done too, the technology of it so far off the scale that it doesn't, can't and shouldn't matter that we have no idea how it's being achieved. If you're worrying about that when the skies fill with TARDISes, I can't help you. Most importantly, perhaps, Moffat manages to reengineer the fate of Gallifrey without trampling over what has gone before - the Ninth Doctor will still be guilt-ridden and traumatised; in another room, Rassilon still plots his own escape. And how fitting that the Doctor should be able to take his greatest defeat and turn it into a victory: Gallifrey not destroyed but saved, his own self not damned but redeemed.

Then, not content with giving us every single previous Doctor, Moffat throws in a couple of future ones. I must confess, the sight of Capaldi's Eyes made me gasp aloud and I'm sure that, even were I to make it to the 100th anniversary, that would still be one of the most thrilling moments in the series' history. But the killer blow belongs to that genius loci of Doctor Who, Tom Baker, back in the programme for the first time in thirty years to play a mercurial future incarnation. It's an emotional moment (how wonderful to see him and Smith together), and a suitably timey-wimey way to salute both past and future.

There's so much more to talk about (incredible direction from Nick Hurran, astonishing production design) but not enough time to do it justice. But I can't not say how good it was to have David Tennant back as the Doctor. I know some feel that his and RTD's era was being sent up slightly, but this really isn't the case - it was more of a greatest hits package, condensed perhaps but without condescension. And Moffat's tenure got just as much needle, not least Hurt's complaints about Smith's flapping hands or the childlike "timey-wimey" (gifting Tennant the best joke of the script: "I've no idea where he gets it from"). He, Hurt and Smith combined beautifully, and the result was brilliantly funny, even joyous - perfectly pitched for an anniversary episode.

Piper and Coleman were also excellent, the former's return astutely executed by Moffat: any further return for Rose herself would have been difficult, if not downright irritating, and her appearance as the Moment/Bad Wolf was just right - simultaneously full of meaning, portent and nostalgia. Coleman had a more difficult job perhaps. Companions can get lost or over-looked in the most straightforward of episodes, but holding her own amongst all this hoopla was no mean feat. Clara's contribution is impossibly important, for it is she who, at the last gasp, forces the Doctor to fulfil his promise. In that moment Clara represents every companion, and justifies the very existence of the role in the show. It is a big deal.

But Clara does something else, right at the top of the episode, that although easily overlooked might be even more important. She ploughs her motorbike through the TARDIS doors. Now, they can keep pulling off this trick every week as far as I'm concerned, because it is superb. It's a perfectly executed entrance shot - a breathtaking composition that takes Clara (and us) from an exterior location, through the TARDIS doors and into the studio set. But this is more than just showing off - this journey, replayed again and again throughout the show's history, is a strand of the programme's DNA, as distinct and as important as the Police Box, the music or the Daleks.

The very first episode, fifty years ago, pivoted around that extraordinary transition, dramatically, technically and in other ways besides. Perhaps we take it for granted, but every time someone moves through those doors, stepping from junkyard to shining white control room, or out into a petrified jungle, a space station, or a country house, we are witnessing the essential magic of Doctor Who. From the outside, that little box is perfectly unassuming - but once the threshold has been crossed, suddenly the spaces on both sides of the doors are full of wonders.